< O >

By clicking on the book cover, you can read the written part of Kivikangas's master's thesis. (Only in Finnish)

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< O >

Project Room galleria
12.–17.3. & 1.–12.7.2020

- Through our senses we are in direct contact with reality.
- Can we develop non-conceptual thinking?
- In nature, color is a fact.
(Ek, 2013)

This exhibition consisting of tempera paintings was born out of the need to calm down and sensitize to the experience of connection and oneness. It's about getting back to the roots and reaching for heights.

During the process I have pondered words, like:
nature, cave painting, primal picture, beauty / austere (wabi), viewing, spirituality, meditation, bareness, climate change, consumer culture, simplification, evolution, connection and oneness.

Although the name of the exhibition; is invalid as a mathematical phrase, one can find compressed inside it plenty of multidirectional symbolism, both conceptual and abstract. Arrows are pointing to the left, towards history, and to the right, towards the future.

Between the arrows is centered O. It is a node, where fossil antiquity can be found right in front of us as a plastic disaster and global warming. It's the circumference; the continuous and infinite present; a hole between worlds; a zero, which is nothing, just as the illusionistic circles of my paintings. As a single symbol, the name of the exhibition is reminiscent of an eye, which is associated with e.g., body, awareness, the third eye, evolution and experience of beauty.

The title of the exhibition works in a way like a manual. Although there are many concepts behind the name, I find it essential to be able to see past them, to explore empirically, here and now - aiming to empathize / attach ourselves to the objects of our senses.

Saija Kivikangas

Lähde: Ek, Ove 2013. “Ove Ek luennoi Goethen värioppia, 25.1.2013” internet lento, https://vimeo.com/58674182

Exhibition view, Project Room, 2020, Saija Kivikangas

Exhibition view, Project Room, 2020, Saija Kivikangas

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Kuvan Kevät 2019

Exhibition Laboratory B
4.5.–2.6.2019

I unbuttoned my coat, took off my shoes and went into the woods. I picked up some plants, mushrooms and rocks that seemed interesting and made pigments from them.

The painter’s questions: What, how, on what and why? These questions, and the answers that will come when I start to do things, define my relationship both with myself and the things that exist around me. The decisions seem to pull me in two opposite directions: either they take me further away from respecting the environment or they reinforce my rapport with it. I feel like I’m caught in between. Between the past and the future, known and unknown, control and the uncontrollable, tangible and intangible, the hand and the eye…

To me, painting signifies the setting and/or manifestation of problems and their resolution. It is a way of seeing, experiencing and paying attention to something that I would not see, experience or notice otherwise. It is about drawing borders and getting rid of them. Some kind of striving for the human core. At its best, making a painting and looking at it can be a sacred act. What exactly takes place in this sacred act is difficult to explain. It is a momentary sense of balance in a state of imbalance.

Exhibition view, Kuvan Kevät 19, Exhibition Laboratory B, 2019, Saija Kivikangas